Re: Divided We Stand

April 23, 2015

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CreditPhotograph by Katy Grannan

Dressing in pantsuits. Wearing sunglasses on a plane. Eating at Chipotle. Even the most ordinary actions are called “polarizing” when Hillary Clinton does them, a phenomenon that Mark Leibovich examined in the April 12 issue of the magazine. “To say that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a polarizing figure — as people do all the time — is to suggest that politics was like a big campfire singalong until this pantsuited fomenter showed up and turned us all against one another,” Leibovich wrote. “The country has been divided for a long time and for a variety of reasons.”

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CreditIllustration by Tom Gauld

Over at Salon, Katie McDonough agreed. “To call Clinton polarizing also implies that polarizing is a thing that a person can be, like some kind of unfortunate personal character trait,” she wrote. “But as Leibovich points out, Clinton isn’t herself polarizing so much as she happens to be a household name in an extraordinarily polarized political climate.”

That divisive climate, some argued, predated Clinton’s rise. “Our nation has been ‘polarized’ since at least the American Revolution,” a commenter identified as Jason Shapiro wrote on nytimes.com. History courses, he argued, “tend to downplay our very significant political, social, economic and religious differences. You may recall that we fought a Civil War over these differences. (Lincoln was the ultimate polarizing figure.)”

Others, though, saw the problem as far more contemporary. “Blame Newt Gingrich,” wrote another commenter, identified as Matt Guest. Gingrich “zeroed in on wedge issues and personal, often dishonest (and occasionally hypocritical) attacks on Democratic lawmakers as a way to weaken and ultimately end their four-­decade-­long control of the House.”

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CreditIllustration by Tom Gauld

Leibovich noted that the word was first applied to Clinton when she was making her public debut as “a working woman and a full political partner with (gasp) feminist tendencies.” But some readers found Clinton’s interactions with women to be one of the most polarizing things about her.

“To me, Clinton is polarizing because she divides feminists into those who are real and those who would throw innocent women (Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey) under the bus and publicly ridicule them in order to save her politically valuable husband’s career,” a commenter identified as SW wrote on nytimes.com.

Many argued that using the word “polarizing” to describe a strong female figure was sexist, much like the word “bossy.” But at The Washington Post’s The Fix, Philip Bump argued that being polarizing and being a politician were inextricable. “Hillary Clinton was much more disliked by Republicans in 2007, when she was a threat to win the presidency, than she was in June 2008, when she wasn’t,” he wrote. “And when she was happily working away in Foggy Bottom in 2012, Republicans barely bothered to hate her at all.” Leibovich’s essay was published just days before Clinton formally announced her second bid for the presidency. “Whoever takes the oath on Jan. 20, 2017,” Bump argued, “is almost certainly going to be just as polarizing. It is entirely a function of the job.”

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